On Two Kinds of Fandom, and Sensory Lessons

How Michigan football made me a better opera listener

Opera fandom is not easy. I write this in full knowledge of the fact that the very first post in this newsletter was my invitation into exploring opera and that one of my points in its favor was that opera has probably never been more accessible to the general public: basically everything is on YouTube, your nearest city is probably somewhat more likely to have a small local opera company than it is to be stop on a major contemporary music tour, and the tickets to said opera will almost certainly cost less than the tickets to said tour. This remains true: the only time opera ever had it this good accessibility-wise was probably the early phonograph era, when the first mega-hit recording artist was the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso and you could find his records in every store and catalog.

And yet there is a sense in which it is not true, because live performances remain rare unless you live close to a first-rate opera house and have enough money to go regularly. The major consequence of this is that the entire reason for going to the opera—the experience of vocal-dramatic artistry live, without any amplification—is obscured, and the artistic moments that change people’s lives forever are consigned to the past, available to us only as (usually bootleg) recordings. Take this recording of Maria Callas in 1951, the uncontested greatest singer of the 20th century at the height of her powers:

If you’ve heard this aria before, you know that the tempo she’s taking is almost unthinkable, an operatic Formula One, and as she hits her high notes, it’s clear that she’s singing at breakneck speed with an absolutely massive instrument; the high E-flat at the end lands perfectly and then just shuts out the entire orchestra. Nobody should be able to do this. Even just listening to it on recording I want to scream because it's so unbelievable. If you had been in the theater for this I actually don’t know how you could have gone on living a normal life. You’d have had to become some kind of holy madman, unable to hold a steady job or even a steady conversation but also somehow able to cure people of blindness with a touch because you’d beheld the face of God. There’d be no going back to everyday living, because who would ever want to go back after encountering a voice like that?

We don’t have that experience; we have the record of it. And while recordings are more widely available than ever before, actual opera houses are not, and the training required to become a classical singer is not. The networks for training and employing artists have been in slow collapse since the middle of the 20th century and that collapse shows no signs of slowing down. I spent a decent number of days as an undergrad skipping my Greek epic or Latin composition classes to stand in line for the $20 orchestra rush at the Met, one of the world’s preeminent opera houses, but I didn’t get any life-changing moments out of it. We can’t just say that we’re going to screen for the truly great artists and cultivate those: institutions are notoriously bad at recognizing artistry, so fewer artists will just mean fewer artists of every rank, including and perhaps especially fewer truly great ones. I loved the opera as an undergrad, but I didn’t know what it was like to be in the room and experience the peak of what a human being could do.

Then I went to grad school, and I ended up at the University of Michigan. I was drawn there by the strength of its classical philology program, but I was taken up by the Michigan sports culture, and above all that means (American) football. For those not in the know, Michigan Stadium (“The Big House”) is the largest sports stadium in the Western hemisphere and the third largest in the entire world, and it is basically impossible not to have fun in the student section of a game. If you have season tickets for seven straight years like I did, you also start to appreciate the game itself: what makes a team good, what makes individual players good, and what a well-executed play looks like. And if you are watching football in the Big House, you get to see some of the most talented young players in the world who have been developed basically to the absolute limit of what someone in their early 20s is capable of. That turns out to include some pretty breathtaking things. Take a look at this highlight reel from Jabrill Peppers, who played at Michigan from 2014–2016 and whom I would not hesitate to call “the Maria Callas of college football”:

Again, absolutely breathtaking stuff. I’m pretty sure at one point he just physically leaps over a Michigan State defender and keeps on running. He could do anything: offense, defense, special teams, whatever, and none of it even seems hard to do when he does it. The major difference here is that this isn’t a bootleg recording from a 1951 Mexico City performance that nobody still living remembers: I was there for a ton of these moments! I never missed a Michigan home game when I had tickets, so I got to see all of this happen (and with pretty decent seats, too)! And the energy in the student section when a player on your team does something extraordinary is unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced: you want to YELL and MOVE because it feels like the excitement is going to tear your body apart if you don’t vent it.

It took a while for me to realize this, but I realized I’d felt it before, when I saw Patti LuPone star in Gypsy in 2008. Being in the theater when a once-in-a-lifetime artistic talent absolutely knocks your socks off is a lot like being in the stadium when a first-rate athletic talent does the same. And that’s what it must have been like, to be there in that room when Callas or del Monaco or Nilsson or Corelli were singing. Your senses take in something that breaks all your standards for what should be possible and your mind and body react in ways that you’re totally unprepared to deal with and you’re helpless to respond in any but the most primal ways, by standing and yelling and hugging the person next to you, and then something has gone out of you, burned out for a time, and you need to process it however you’re wired to do that: you might go home and sit in a chair in low light, or you might go to a quiet bar where you can discuss it endlessly with your friends, or you might go to a club and dance the night away. However you process it, you feel like you have to, because you’ve come into contact with something that burns too brightly to sustain. You can’t hold onto it; you have to mute it or, you feel, you’ll be burned to ash like Semele gazing upon the true face of Zeus. Human beings were never meant to hold lightning in our hands.

Of course Michigan football wasn’t my only teacher about this; I owe a lot to Euripides’s Bacchae as well. But the sensory lesson, the experiential one, was for me the most important. I’ve had a few other sensory lessons that I’d rank similarly: I don’t think I started to really understand poetry until 2009, when I went out at midnight with other members of the Philolexian Society, many of us simultaneously drunk and wired from pouring whiskey in our coffee and reading Beat poetry, to stand in the center of campus and read Ginsberg’s “Howl” (including the postscript) at the top of our lungs. Call it the barbaric yawp, the primal HWÆT, the rhapsode’s call: that arresting vocality and sense of sonic texture has stayed with me ever since. There are lessons you will not be taught in a classroom; there are things about being a human being that you will not learn by behaving politely and normally. There are things you can only understand if you will risk yourself and reach out to grasp the lightning.